In the field of oncology, chemotherapy is in most cases applied in order to treat the cancer. Various chemo-medications exist and their effectiveness depends strongly on the type of tumor. The tumors are in general divers and as a result, the effectiveness of the chemo-medication is difficult to predict. Currently, only after weeks, the effectiveness can be determined, for instance with PET-CT. Timely determining of the effectiveness is important in order not to lose time in treating the tumor and to reduce costs of the chemotherapy.
In order to introduce a suprapub catheter in the bladder, splittable needles are used in the field of urology. An example is the Cystofix of the company B. Braun. They have a needle that contains a rolled tear line that enables the splitting of the needle in two parts. There are two drawbacks of this construction. At one side, the rolled tear line is not along the complete needle. This makes splitting the needle difficult at the part where the tear line stops. Furthermore, this means that splitting of the needle can only be performed when it is completely outside the body. After splitting the needle the edges are very sharp and may have a risk of causing harm to the patient or the physician. Certainly, the needle cannot be partly split to create a temporally opening to the side to perform measurements or to perform treatments.
From GB 2 278 060 A, a needle for introducing a catheter is known which is splittable, so that it can be removed after the catheter has been inserted. The needle has two longitudinally extending notches on opposite sides thereof which allow the needle to be split into halves. The already pre-split ends of the needle are inserted into a sleeve which can also be split into two longitudinal halves by means of grooves. The splitting process in initiated by moving two fins projecting radially from each half of the sleeve towards one another. After a partial splitting of the sleeve along the groove one or more projections on the fins meet and continued movement of the fins towards one another causes the sleeve to split along the groove. Partially opening the needle is not possible in this construction.